Alan Bates

Alan Bates ran the post office in Craig-y-Don, Llandudno, with his partner Suzanne Sercombe from 1998. Within a couple of years the Horizon accounting system installed by the Post Office began showing discrepancies in his accounts that he could not trace. Under their contracts sub-postmasters were personally liable for shortfalls, and most quietly paid. Bates refused, kept records of everything, and asked repeatedly for the underlying data. In 2003 the Post Office terminated his contract without explanation.

He was told he was the only one having problems. He did not believe it. In 2009, after a trade magazine published the stories of several sub-postmasters who had been prosecuted for theft or false accounting on Horizon evidence, he called a meeting in a village hall in Warwickshire, and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance was formed. For the next decade he wrote letters, chased ministers, gave evidence to a mediation scheme that the Post Office shut down, and held together a group of people many of whom had been to prison, gone bankrupt or been shunned by their villages.

In 2017 the group of 555 claimants took the Post Office to the High Court. The judge found in 2019 that Horizon had contained bugs and errors throughout, and that the Post Office had behaved as if it were above the law. The settlement was largely swallowed by legal costs, but the judgment opened the way for the courts to quash convictions.

A television drama in January 2024 turned the story into a national scandal, and Parliament passed a law that year overturning the convictions wholesale. Bates, who had declined an OBE while the Post Office's former chief executive kept her honour, was knighted that summer.